Friday, December 02, 2005

So much for diligence

In the two days I worked before Thanksgiving, I fielded questions from two grumpy patrons.

One was a woman who called asking the location of the library and the status of parking. I gave her the new address, directions and options for parking: She could use our new, secure garage next door which is $2.00 and hour with a max of $10.00 a day, or a close by empty lot which charges only $3.00 a day. I also told her that if she spent less than an hour here, She could get her parking validated and park for free. She dismissively responded to this by saying that her genealogy research couldn't be done in an hour and that it was inconvenient for people to have to drive downtown (as opposed to one of the branches) in order to do this sort of research.

The other was a gentleman who came in looking for the Grants Resource Center. In the previous building, this was a separate room with both circulating and non-circulating materials. In the new building, the non-circulating materials were given their own special section in Reference and the circulating materials were integrated with the nonfiction collection. When I showed him the stuff in Reference and told him that circulating materials would be under the same call numbers on the third floor, he screwed up his face and complained that it was a big hassle to go upstairs.

A little advice, folks. My wife is familiar with the great lengths her grandfather went for his genealogy research and I know from several acquaintances the bureaucratic hoops one has to jump through for government grants. If you don't have the dedication and patience to travel downtown or even climb a flight of stairs, then you may just want to hang it up right now.